Monday, February 25, 2008

I've got 15 minutes before I have to meet my boss. I should be doing Sheba edits, but instead I'm going to provisionally list the things I want most in a steno program that I'm not already getting in Eclipse. Many of these I already mentioned in the post on my regular blog, but I want to go into more detail on this one, and I figure a broad set of desired features (off the top of my head, with many more to come) will lay the foundation.

Back later. Okay:

General lack of dialogue boxes. Most crucial to this is search. Vim style searching with type-ahead find, forwards or backwards + wrap, with options to set ignore case or not = absolutely ideal. The current Eclipse implementation is a nightmare.

Options in DigitalCAT that aren't in Eclipse: anti-Gollum (auto in DC; should be toggle in Plover) setting, so that you don't get thingses like improper pluralses. Globaling of y to ies through the document when one word is edited (though case is not recognized in DC, so if you're doing all caps, you get CITY -> CITies.), -L,-G,-S,-Z auto translation. Possibly include -R as well. Crucial, crucial feature.

Edited 03/24: I'm choosing to post this rather than keep the draft to build on, because it just doesn't seem to happen. Accretion, that's the key. Little posts with morsels of information apiece. They don't all have to be treatises.

I decided to make a separate blog for thoughts on Plover, since so much of what I've been turning over in my head is too technical and obsessed with minutiae to be of interest to readers of my regular blog. I'm uncertain whether I'll share this address with anyone else; if I get some good stuff down and can figure out how to refine my ideas, I'll probably pass it along to my brother William at the very least, since he's signed on to help me out with the project. Along with posts on the design of the program itself, I might use this blog to hold links to information on Python for beginners (which I surely am; Bozzy was about as simple as a program can be, and Plover will be more complex by many orders of magnitude.), or possibly idle thoughts about how best to disseminate steno throughout the hacker/wearable subculture. Here's hoping this blog will give me an incentive to actually put my thoughts into words instead of just perseverating on them mentally for several hours a day.